UN mulls next move as officials warn on tight timeframe for elections

The UN Security Council will meet next week to decide on its next move to push Cote d’Ivoire back towards peace as UN officials in Abidjan warn that the clock is ticking if elections are to be held on schedule in October. “I wouldn’t say there’s been any quantum leap forward since December,” Alan Doss, the UN’s Deputy Special Representative to Cote d’Ivoire, told IRIN following a fresh visit by South African President Thabo Mbeki, the official mediator, this week. “We are still working towards that October deadline, but yes it becomes ever more difficult every day that goes by and we don’t see progress in some of these areas,” he said. “We would have wished to have been further down the road, no doubt about it.” An African Union meeting in the Gabonese capital, Libreville, on Monday urged the United Nations to hold off bringing a second wave of sanctions into force against key individuals in Cote d'Ivoire in order to give Mbeki's mediation effort more time to bear fruit. Sources at the Security Council in New York said that its sanctions committee would comply with the AU's request by deferring the planned imposition of travel bans and asset freezes against individuals who were regarded as obstacles to the peace process. But they said the sanctions committee might forge ahead with measures against those accused of committing human rights violations and stoking up hatred in the media. “For those blocking the peace process, at this point we can do nothing because the South African mediation is going on. We will have to wait,” a diplomatic source at the 15-nation Security Council told IRIN on Thursday. “But we can move forward on two criteria – human rights and hate media.” He said the sanctions committee was waiting to access the annex of a UN human rights report, which contains some 200 names, as well as a dossier listing the contents of hate messages in the media. These two documents would provide the grist for next week’s discussions. Diplomatic sources in Abidjan and New York said the Security Council was also likely to respond next week to a request from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for an additional 1,200 UN peacekeepers in Cote d'Ivoire, which has been split in two since civil war erupted in September 2002. Meanwhile France, the former colonial power in Cote d'Ivoire, which has 4,000 peacekeeping troops under its own command in the West African country, has drafted a new resolution to toughen up a UN arms embargo that was imposed in mid-November. The ban on arms sales to both the government and rebel forces occupying the north of the country, was imposed after President Laurent Gbagbo shattered an 18-month ceasefire by bombing the rebel-held north. “The Security Council… reaffirms the demand… that all States, particularly those bordering Cote d’Ivoire, take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to Cote d’Ivoire of arms,” reads the draft, a copy of which was obtained by IRIN. The draft resolution also seeks to give the 10,000 UN and French peacekeepers in the country the authority to stop and search any aircraft or vehicle at ports, airports and border crossings. It also asks the Ivorian government army and the New Forces rebel movement to provide an inventory of their weapons within a month. Countdown to elections While the diplomatic offensive continues, officials warn that long delays in implementing a peace agreement negotiated in January 2003, are making it increasingly difficult to hold presidential and parliamentary elections in October as planned. An internal UN report, seen by IRIN, says a minimum of seven months would be needed to prepare the electoral process in Cote d’Ivoire if it were to conform to international standards of transparency and fairness. The voter lists from Cote d’Ivoire’s last elections in 2000 have been contested by the opposition. The UN report estimates that they include only 60 percent of those who are eligible to vote this time round. However, it recommends that rather than starting a new voter registration exercise from scratch, the government should update the electoral roll by opening up 2,500 voter registration centres around the country. The report, written after a field trip to Cote d’Ivoire in October 2004, recommended that preparations for the elections, including the setting up of these voter registration centres, should start at the beginning of December. But six weeks later, no action has been taken to start this process and the chances of completing all the necessary preparations in time for the elections are getting smaller. “There was the November flare-up and nothing has happened up to now,” said one international observer monitoring the electoral process in Abidjan. “Things are probably getting too tight, if you want to do it in the correct way,” he added. “It’s getting more and more difficult but I think one should still work towards it.” Gbagbo spoke publicly about a possible postponement of the poll last week, saying he would not step down as president at the end of his present term if fresh elections could not take place on schedule. Tough going The mountain Mbeki has to climb to get the peace process moving so elections can be held on time, was rammed home this week, when he called in to Cote d’Ivoire on his way back from the Libreville summit.

President Mbeki has been mediating since November

The rebels boycotted a special cabinet meeting on Tuesday in the official capital Yamoussoukro, just 50 km south of the frontline, at which Mbeki was guest of honour. And they have once more refused calls to start handing in their weapons to UN peacekeepers. The rebels accused Mbeki of betraying them at Libreville, where the AU admitted the possibility of holding a referendum to decide whether a key opposition leader, Alassane Ouattara can run for president. Ouattara, a former prime minister, was prevented from running against Gbagbo in 2000 on the disputed grounds that his father was Burkinabe. Many analysts see this issue as the crux of Cote d’Ivoire’s troubles. Between a quarter and a third of the country's 16 million inhabitants are immigrants from other West African countries or their descendents. Although the national assembly approved a constitutional amendment last month allowing people with just one Ivorian parent to run for the presidency, Gbagbo has repeatedly demanded a referendum to rubber stamp the change. The rebels are against this option because they would likely have to disarm first. “The political solution… has just been dropped in favour of a legal solution to end the crisis. Yet, everybody knows that this solution will not bring peace,” rebel spokesman Sidiki Konate told Radio France Internationale earlier this week. “On the contrary, it will worsen the dissension," he added. "It will even create the germs for the resumption of the war.” The G7 opposition alliance, which groups the rebels and the four main opposition parties in parliament, also protested at the AU's willingness to allow a referendum. “Recourse to a referendum is not suited to the current political and social climate,” Alphonse Djedje-Mady, the G7 chairman and secretary general of the Democratic Party of Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI), said in a statement on Thursday. The G7 also repeated its accusation that Gbagbo was preparing for an imminent resumption of hostilities. The president's camp has meanwhile cried victory, saying that with the political reforms done and dusted, the onus is now on the rebels to hand over their weapons and prove they are serious about peace. “If that happens, we can then have a referendum in June and that will give us four months to organise the elections and that is the way out of this crisis,” Mamadou Koulibaly, the speaker of parliament and a key ally of Gbagbo, told IRIN.